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How-To Geek

Our first edition of WIG for July is filled with news link goodness covering topics such as why Microsoft killed the Start Button in Windows 8, how to outsmart websites trying to get you to pay top dollar, OS X Mountain Lion will check daily for security updates, and more.

First stable version of Chrome for Android releasedChrome for Android has seen its first stable version released by the Google Chrome development team. The mobile browser is tipped to be a future replacement for Google’s default browser on the mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets.

Sonic.net stopped saving logs for more than 14 days in order to frustrate copyright trollsSonic.net is a great ISP. Not only are they technically proficient, but they also spend their own money fighting stupid subpoenas on their customers’ behalf. They noticed that neither their sysadmins nor the cops ever needed logfiles going back more than 14 days, and that only scummy copyright trolls benefited from longer log retention, so they cut their logging to two weeks.

Update for Windows Update has teething troublesMicrosoft has released an unscheduled, non-patch day update for Windows to update the Windows Update function itself. However, according to reports from readers, the Windows Update Agent update does not always run smoothly.

Security concerns over Firefox’s “new tab” thumbnail featureOne of the new features in the recent Firefox 13 release is raising security concerns from privacy-conscious users: when users open a new tab in version 13 of the open source web browser, they are presented a grid of the nine most visited pages, each with its own screenshot thumbnail. These thumbnails could be displaying private information though.

Mountain Lion to phone home daily looking for security updateApple is showing signs that the company is taking the security of OS X far more seriously than it has in the past. In addition to features like app sandboxing and Gatekeeper, OS X Mountain Lion will also apparently check for critical security updates more regularly by default and will install them automatically.

Social networking sites for kids equally dangerousSocial networks targeted at underage children are “ideal” but their success may actually make them more attractive to predators, say security market players. Although there are additional safeguards in place on such sites, protection ultimately begins with house rules and close supervision.

Worth Reading: Exploited despite sandboxAdobe Reader X runs in a sandbox at a very restricted privilege level. Important system calls are supposed to be handled by a special broker process that will subject them to extensive testing. However, a small design flaw allows attackers to user system calls, circumvent ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomisation) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and execute arbitrary code.

Automated robbery: how card skimmers (still) steal millions from banksIn January 2011, a pair of Bulgarian-born Canadians named Nikolai Ivanov and Dimitar Stamatov took a road trip from their home in Quebec to New York City. Their five-day visit to Manhattan’s East Village and Astor Place wasn’t your typical tourist trek, though; instead of Statue of Liberty souvenirs, the pair collected the card data and personal identification numbers for over 1,100 ATM cards.

Every Minute of the DayData never sleeps. Every minute massive amounts of it are being generated from every phone, website and application across the Internet. Just how much data is being created and where does it come from?

Some Like it FunnyA flowchart that helps you determine which comedies you should be watching.

Comments (2)

I wouldn’t call Chrome for Android stable. It requires ICS; yet, in CM9, it crashes when you try to open a tab. So I suppose it doesn’t do that if you got ICS pushed to you OTA, which is only a couple devices. Since there are more devices that need CM9 to get ICS on their device, and ICS is required, I would suggest that Chrome is broken for over half its target audience. That is not stable.

Not that I’m holding Google responsible for CyanogenMod. Just their software that needs it to run. They could also make one for Gingerbread, with a way to get the Gingerbread one in CM9 (if that would help).